I have been watching a dvd on Joyce's Ulysses, and I wrote down a great quote to share with you all. It was said shortly after Ulysses was published in 1922 as a commentary on the book's significance.
T.S. Eliot writes:
“I hold this book to be the most important expression which the present age has found. It is a book to which we are all indebted and from which none of us can escape. Joyce had made the novel obsolete by replacing the narrative method with the mythical method. Instead of telling a story from a particular and consistent point of view, as 19th century novelists had done, Joyce manipulates a continuous parallel b/t contemporaneity and antiquity; that is, between life in early 20th century Dublin and the mythic episodes of Homer’s ancient epic called The Odyssey. Joyce used ancient myth as a way of controlling – of ordering – of giving a shape and significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy, which is contemporary history.”
The professor giving the lecture (James A.W. Heffernan) also said:
It is a novel of flesh and blood, of pain and passion, music and laughter, a symphony of human voices.
on the characters - Joyce wrote what they do, think, feel, imagine, and fantasize about.
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